A special week of hugs and healing marks the one-year anniversary of Jewish center shootings

Fingers grazed collarbones and then rested above hearts as eyes looked toward the American Flag.

Reat Underwood’s voice flowed from the speakers near the stage set up in the Jewish Community Center parking lot.

The hundreds of people who had gathered and danced to pop music now stood still. A few gasped when they learned that they would soon hear Reat’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” recorded at a Blue Valley Educational Foundation fundraising breakfast in 2013.

They paused and listened to the 14-year-old, whose voice was muted much too soon.

It was exactly a year ago, here in this Overland Park parking lot, that tragedy shook the Kansas City area.

Around 1 p.m. April 13, 2014, a gunman identified as neo-Nazi F. Glenn Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, began his assault at the Jewish Community Center campus and Village Shalom, a Jewish retirement community also in Overland Park. He had driven up from southern Missouri in what authorities now consider a hate crime. Reat and his grandfather, 69-year-old William Corporon, were killed at the Jewish Community Center, and 53-year-old Terri LaManno was shot and killed at Village Shalom. All victims were of the Christian faith.

The community mourned. Then Mindy Corporon — Reat’s mother and William Corporon’s daughter — decided to take action. She and others outlined what would become Seven Days: Make a Ripple, Change the World.

The weeklong series of events included influential speakers and suggestions for community service, all orchestrated to look past last year’s tragedy and forward to how people can make a positive impact in others’ lives. The seven days led up to the one-year anniversary of the killings, culminating in a three-mile Peace Walk from the center to the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood.

“I have a purpose in showing people that there is going to be evil in the world and we have to shine light on it,” Corporon said.

Earlier in the day, the final of the seven, was a Mass at St. Peter’s Church in Brookside, followed by a balloon release and then the unveiling of a memorial bench at Blue Valley High School to honor Reat.

The national anthem came before the crowd walked to the church, where there would be a candle lighting and a performance of a song written for a contest as part of the Seven Days reflection.

Kansas City Mayor Sly James told the crowd that the seven days were evidence that “we really are one family,” he said. “This is about what we do, not what we say.”

Rabbi Jonathan Rudnick’s blessing sent the crowd forth.

“We feel pain, but we also feel hope,” he said. “Start walking and make your ripple.”

Then the more than 3,000 people — more than Corporon ever hoped for — turned southward to the Church of the Resurrection in a symbolic gesture to move from memories of hate toward dreams of a better world.

The video images horrify. Bodies collapsed in heaps. A dark shadow draped across the Rwandan farmland and rolling hills. For three minutes, visitors at St. Peter’s Church in Brookside sat under the dim lights and remembered the slaughter.

Then Jacqueline Murekatete began to talk. She was one of the highlighted guests sharing her story as part of the Seven Days events. Murekatete came to speak in Kansas City after she met Corporon and Jim LaManno, Terri’s LaManno’s husband, last year.

The night was the third of seven days. The theme was “Others.”

She told her story of faith, and survival, during the 100 days of terror when the Rwandan government murdered its own citizens.

It was just over 20 years ago that she found herself running for her life because she was born into the Tutsi ethnic group. Laws dehumanized the group. They were called “cockroaches” and the government planned an efficient genocide that took three months before the madness ceased.

She and her grandmother fled into hiding for fear that they might be killed along with others.

Murekatete didn’t know what happened to the rest of her family.

“I always believed my mother and family would survive,” Murekatete said.

But Murekatete’s mother and siblings had died with the thousands of others.

“Even as we sit here threats of genocide exist — (Myanmar), Sudan and Syria,” she said. “Crimes of genocide remain a major threat facing us in the global community. I want people to speak out against hate, against intolerance, against extremism.”

Tyrone Flowers of Kansas City spoke next. He overcame his own adversity to create Higher M-Pact, which serves high-risk youth and attempts to provide mentoring and opportunities for them to be successful.

He told his survival story of birth to unmarried teenage parents, abuse in foster care, moving from group homes and facilities, a bevy of learning and behavioral problems diagnosed while he asked himself, “Why me? Where’s my family?”

Thinking of others has helped him heal and focus his mission.

“It wasn’t about me; it was what can make a difference in the life of kids,” he said.

His first goal when working with youth is getting kids to believe in themselves, and with that, the ripple will carry over to their friends and family.

“(These kids) just want love and acceptance like us,” he said.

He’s not trying to solve all these kids’ problems, but make their lives more manageable. It starts with all of us having faith in each other, he said.

“All it takes is acts of kindness,” he said.

Ekkehard Othmer and his wife, Sieglinde, don’t shake hands when greeting. They reach out and pull a person close.

When news of the tragedy at the Jewish Community Campus hit, the Parkville couple knew they needed to do something. They wanted to send a message of hope and acceptance.

The Othmers previously had helped sponsor the KC SuperStar singing competition held at the Jewish Community Center. Reat’s grandfather was taking him to audition when they were killed as they arrived at the center.

Ekkehard Othmer began telling of how he became involved with the Seven Days events by recounting the story of Reat’s being too young in previous years to audition for KC SuperStar.

“And now he was finally old enough,” Ekkehard said before choking up.

“That is what really hit me,” he said, his eyes tearing and his body tensing.

Sieglinde sat forward and continued.

“It was an emotional time and we found it unbelievable,” she said. Her husband “was deeply moved by it.”

They decided to create a nonprofit — RRACE (Racial, Religious, Acceptance and Cultural Equality) — after hearing about the tragedy.

Ekkehard, a psychiatrist and psychologist, had the idea of a songwriting competition that would be part of events to mark the anniversary emphasize acceptance of others. He wanted to ask teenagers and young adults to write songs centered around RRACE’s themes of cultural equality, while providing scholarship prizes for the top winners. The top song would be performed on the last night of Seven Days following a peace walk.

“I said we should have a competition in which the young people tell us the way they feel,” said Ekkehard.

“Music moves, it unites,” Sieglinde added.

Ekkehard Othmer was born the year Hitler took over and he recalled the Fuhrer’s voice on the radio.

“I said, ‘Ma, who is this hateful man?’” he recalled.

When the war was over no one believed what had happened — a “genocide by the government,” he said.

His upbringing influenced his career.

“I studied everything that has to do with motivation,” he said. “I wanted to become a theater director. I played in Hamburg and briefly worked with Gustav Gruendgens, whose interesting personality is characterized in the movie ‘Mephisto.’ Gruendgens was a homosexual, but still managed to become the leading actor in theater under Hitler’s regime with readjustment to democratic post-war Germany. From acting, I went into psychology and psychiatry, with a lifelong interest in people’s motivation.”

He was educated by Jewish re-immigrants who returned to Germany.

“This experience put me in touch with victims of racism,” he said. “I was impressed by the ability of people to focus on the good that they had experienced in a country that caused them so much pain.”

Tammy Ruder, Seven Days producer and coordinator, is also the producer and director of KC SuperStar.

With the songwriting that the Othmers have created comes hope — that the young people touched with the composing of lyrics will also touch others with their words, Ruder said. The event received more than 40 song submissions.

“This has been a healing experience and it has been so positive and so community-oriented,” Ruder said. “It helps us to understand that we are we are human and we may have different orientations, but we are all alike.”

Jim LaManno lost the love of his life to someone who harbored hate.

Is it hard to go on?

He laughed uncomfortably. “Yeah.”

“I even have days when I think, ‘Did this really happen?’” he said. “I don’t remember April. I don’t remember May. I don’t even remember what I did last week. This last year has been kind of a blur for me. It seems like it has taken a lifetime to go by and it has gone by in a second, if that makes any sense.”

A second generation Italian-American, he grew up in an East Side neighborhood where there were black, Jewish and white families. His mom fed any kid who walked into their house.

“I was used to seeing all kinds of people since I grew up in the city,” he said.

He married Terri and they settled in the melting pot of the Waldo neighborhood and planned for the close proximity to the nearby urban Catholic schools, St. Peter’s and St. Teresa’s Academy.

“If someone would have told me that someone was going to drive up from southern Missouri and murder my wife …” he said. “I don’t get that. I don’t get that kind of hatred, and until my dying day I won’t ever understand it.”

His wife, Terri, was kind in every way, he said. Look at the kindness in her eyes, he said, passing a phone across the table to show a picture of her hugging their dog, Nellie, three years ago.

Could he forgive after what has happened?

“How do you forgive someone who changed your life so dramatically and you can’t even speak of it?” he said a few weeks before the Seven Days events. “There are days when I wake up and think I’m moving forward and days when I wake up and think I could care less about moving forward.”

The day after the Seven Days walk, LaManno said the week was therapeutic in some ways.

“I have come to the realization that a lot of people have overcome and prospered (in tragic circumstances),” he said. “You can keep the memory of the special person going and still go on with your life and have a productive life.”

He is directing his energy at his children and on the scholarship fund he has created to help his wife’s cause and life’s work, Children’s Center for the Visually Impaired. He will take Terri’s place as a volunteer at this weekend’s Trolley Run, which benefits the center. The public can donate to “Team Terri” and proceeds will go toward the scholarship.

“I’m proud that what she loved will go on,” he said.

Before peace walkers journeyed to the Church of the Resurrection to light candles and listen to Michaelah Burns’ winning song, “Free Bird,” they stood in the Jewish Community Center’s parking lot with friends and family.

Jake Goldman, a junior at Blue Valley North High School and youth board director for Faith Always Wins, the organization Corporon established after the killings, stood out in a bright orange T-shirt.

His motivation to become involved is personal. He had witnessed racial slurs directed toward one of his black friends at school.

“I was dealing with intolerance (at school) and then (the Jewish Community Center campus shootings) happened,” he said. “I felt compelled to do something” and “burst the Johnson County bubble” of homogeny and start talking about people of other cultures and races, he said.

He spoke with administrators of his school district and they directed him to Faith Always Wins. He took the position of youth board director and soon became involved with the Seven Days planning. He helped recruit young people to join in the peace walk.

“Something had to change,” he said.

Then he shook his head side to side to the many, many people standing around waiting to walk.

“Look all around you — this is what happens when love conquers hate.”

His message amplified as Allison Basinger raised a sign above her head that read, “Love Always Wins” as she marched near the one-mile mark.

“I believe in this so much,” said Basinger, of Stilwell, who is humane education manager at Wayside Waifs. “I wanted to be a part of it. My heart is beating so fast, and it’s not because I’m out of shape.”

Then she kept walking.

This story was originally published April 21, 2015 at 5:41 PM with the headline "A special week of hugs and healing marks the one-year anniversary of Jewish center shootings."